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Make Money Online – Feel The Power Of The Anchor Text

Well, that did not take very long! Barely four days after I changed the rules for the Make Money Online reviews, I am on page 1 of Google.com for the term “make money online.”

If anything can demonstrate the power of anchoring you text links, this is it. Four days ago, this blog was ranked 158th place for make money online. Now it’s at the number 3 spot. Judging by the number of sponsored links, make money online is a highly prized key phase.

How does this translate in terms of traffic? The overture keyword tool says there were over 44,000 searches last month for make money online. Overture only reports on Yahoo! properties so you can expect Google to have at least twice that volume. If just 10% of searchers click my link, it could mean 8,000 or more Google visitors to this blog every month. And this is just for one search term!

Getting everyone to link to my blog with my anchor text was just part of the puzzle. I had to make some changes to the blog to speed my charge to page 1 of Google. The first thing I did was change the title of the blog home page from John Chow dot Com – The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul to Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com.

The second thing I had to do was to make sure some posts on the front page had the targeted keywords in them. Ideally, they should be in the blog post title because more weight is placed on that. Now you understand the evilness behind some of my post titles. In addition, the targeted keywords should be repeated a few times in the article.

Tips To Choosing Anchor Text

Sure, you may think “super cool dude” is a great anchor for your blog but if no one searches for it, then it’s worthless. The best way to find out what anchor texts to go after is by using a keyword tool like Overture or WordTracker.

Overture is free but doesn’t give you much information other than how many times that keyword was searched for over the previous month. WordTracker cost money but offers a ton more information. You enter some keywords, and WordTracker tells you how often people search for them and how many competing sites use those keywords. They also offer a free trial and 30-day money back guarantee if it doesn’t work out for you.

The other way to choose an anchor text is to look at what words searchers are using to get to your site now and try to rank for variations of it. For example, I could go after make money blogging or just make money. You just have to be creative. And being a little evil helps too. 😈

176 thoughts on “Make Money Online – Feel The Power Of The Anchor Text”

Cool – congrats. I guess some of the Google datacenters haven’t updated to the same stats as the one you’re using – I’m seeing you at #31.

But I’m not sure you’re using the term “anchor text” correctly… “the anchor keywords should be repeated a few times in the article” — I think something like “targeted key phrase” would be more appropriate.

Anchor text is the text you use when you’re linking to website (or something else) – it’s the text enclosed by the “a href” tag.

Is there an easy way to find your rank in a Google search? I was included in this review post for “Scion tC” and gave up looking after 300 results. I’m not surprised since my site is new but was curious how far back I was.

Scion tC is a sports coupe by Toyota. I think it’s only available in the United States.

On a side note, I wrote a review on The Number 23 (Jim Carrey movie) and I come up as the number three or four result for “paranoia 23”. In fact, it’s the second biggest keyword phrase that has directed traffic my way this month.

Considering that John has well over 3,000 RSS subscribers, he has no problem pulling in the traffic. Even if a smalltime blog was giving away a Lamborghini, it would not have been as effective a campaign as John’s (unless the story got picked up and spread around the blogosphere).

It isn’t just the number of readers. It is the type of readers. Most people here have blogs and many of them are about making money on line, so it is easy to link to John. If everyone here was running blogs about hair dryers, the contests might not be quite as easy.

My contests take quite a bit longer to complete because my readers are coming coming for productivity tips, not all of them own blogs, and if they do they aren’t about productivity.

Talked to a friend who is selling a special product for golf online. I mentioned about John’s way of advertising and asking him would he be willing to let me give his product for free to my blog readers the way John did it? He said sure if I only ask for one. The only trouble is, as of now, I still don’t have any idea on how am I going to set up the winner’s criterion? I will sleep with it for few more nights. 😈 Or may be I just ask him to visit johnchow.com and read the 123pen or that vibrator’s story.

You could try, but I’m guessing that your blog doesn’t have as large of an audience as John’s. I posted up the contest on the 1234 pens blog, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have gained as much attention as it has if it weren’t for John mentioning (and endorsing) it.

“there is always a conflict between writing for search engines and writing for humans!”

Only if you take it to extremes. There’s a massive grey area in the middle that makes for quality SEO fodder and is pleasant to read for humans. Though I don’t know how machine gun toting cats will react to it… 😛

It is often better to try and hit one keyword per post, then, if you get links to your posts use that same keyword.

The post title is the most important element, as this also becomes the page title and tags.

If you tightly theme a blog it is easier to get rank on your kewords.

My blog linked above does not do this, but another I have got PR4 with only a few posts on the site, and is starting to rank well for certain keywords = traffic.

What you also need a ONE WAY links into your site, i.e. not recirocal / exchanged links which merely cancel each other out.

I have a post on my blog where I am trying to get bloggers interested in SEO to triangulate links between themselves, so you exchange links through a networkd and get ONE WAY links to your blog, Like JC has done with his Wii competition.

Sorry for the newbie question but could you tell me how to change the title of the blog home page (the one that shows in the window title bar) without changing the title in the header of your blog (as you seem to have done?

Yeah, I would like to see the traffic analysis as well. When you do your recap for this month, make sure to note any spikes around this time. I would love to see a day by day graph of uniques and overall page views for your site John.

sounds good but it’s wrong. Overtures keyword tool is practically useless. According to word trackers results a little over 1300 searches over the past 90 days for that term, so expect about 400 searches a month, more or probably less.

I have been documenting this climbing since March 15. As you may see from this picture at http://mysattrack.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/mmoneyonline4.gif you were already in page one as of last night. When I check it after reading your post around 3 hours ago, I couldn’t find your entry and I kept waiting to see it propagated. It wasn’t until almost midnight here that finally Google displayed your site in number 2 spot. Congratulations!

Hey there John – don’t know if you actually read these comments, but excellent job on the ranking. I am about to kick off some similar experiments at QuoteMyAuto.org – it will probably take me a couple of weeks to get the site updated, but I will be anxious to see how it goes.

This is a little bit off topic, but I was just wondering. “Make money online” applies to your site, but “root of all evil” could be contested. Does Google ever look at this and perhaps modify your ranking?

Interesting to see the focus of this site change from different observations about financial things and how money was made to competing with ProBlogger . 🙂

I am also surprised no one above compared content on the two sites, and only focused on the results. You have done a good job so far, so keep it up! I was a regular reader on ProBlogger before JohnChow was born in its new form, and I will continue to read it. At the same time, JohnChow is also taking up a lot of time every week as I have to reread your posts to apply them to my situation. 🙂

You can also try the KeywordDiscovery.com keyword research tool which offers a free trial and similar (monthly and yearly) subscription options like WordTracker. Key difference is that KeywordDiscovery has a much larger keyword database and provides historical data for the past 12 months for every keyword.

"How I Went From Zero to Over $100,000 a Month"

The Original Dot Com Mogul

John Chow, a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, member of the Save the Whales Foundation, the man who controls the black market on baby seal pelts and member of the probably yo’ daddy foundation...

John Chow rocketed onto the blogging scene when he showed the income power of blogging by taking his blog from making zero to over $40,000 per month in just two years.